Contact: dfriedman3@cox.net
Mercifully Brief Bio
Detailed, Long-winded History
1979 Oberlin College Art and English majors
While in college I spent much of my time involved in photography. I worked on my personal work as well as photographing for the student newspaper, various theater productions, and running the student darkroom cooperative.
1979-1983 photojournalist Middletown (Ohio) Journal
news, sports, features, advertising--everything that happened for four years in that town, I was there.
1983-1992 Commercial Photographer, Phoenix Arizona
I photographed products, people with products, people at work making products, buildings, portraits, annual reports etc. in the studio and on location.
1993-2003 Teacher, Scottsdale School District
I taught 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th graders during my decade in education. For the first four years I taught combination classes. Third and fourth graders and fourth and fifth graders. It was interesting, revealing, and hectic. Middle school was simpler in terms of content as I was only teaching one subject but I had 150 students. My last year I taught eighth-grade humanities, my favorite curricular area as it aligned perfectly with my college majors, for the first time ever, but then budget cuts would have increased my student load to 180 eighth-graders, hormone-besotted adolescents, the next year so I took the opportunity to salvage my sanity and leave. It was time to do the thing rather than teach the thing.
2003-present Some tutoring, mostly art.
I spend many hours in my backyard, under the shade of a palo verde tree bending and shaping steel. I help my son with algebra, make dinner, and keep track of my daughter during her second year at Wellesley College. She and her friend Rachel made a film this summer, Shot Glass, casting her friends and borrowing their houses for locations. You'll see it soon when she's a famous director/screenplay writer/ producer.
My son spends most of his time playing in the Chaparral High School Firebird Marching Band, or Phoenix Symphony Guild Youth Orchestra when he isn't scarfing down YC's Mongolian barbecue with his friend Glenn.
Isaac is a Freshman at University of Colorado at Boulder as a trumpet performance major hoping to end up as a trumpet player in an orchestra.
Ellis is now junior and currently writing, directing and shooting the Junior Show. She'll be spending the spring semester in Beijing and to further hone her Chinese language skills. She spent a month in Shanghai over the summer in a language program and then went to Florence, Italy for a New York Film Academy film class. Tough summer for the poor dear, which ended with the Telluride Film Festival Student Symposium.
This is me when I was about 3 or 4 when we lived in Fort Knox, Kentucky.
When I graduated from Oberlin College in 1979 with a double major in English and Art, I was ready to leave the structured world of academia and see what the rest of the world did while I was in school. I worked for the Middletown (Ohio) Journal, a steel and paper mill town between Cincinnati and Dayton.
I had no family ties in Middletown or a primal urge to live within site of a steel mill, but they offered me a job as a photographer and I took it. The intrigue lay in moving to a town where I knew no one, and would have probably never gone as it was not a tourist attraction. It was just a town in Ohio where people lived and worked. I was born in Cincinnati, 30 miles south of Middletown, as had my father and his father, so there was a southwest Ohio connection.
My job was to take pictures of things that happened, develop the film, make a print and make deadline. I photographed everything and anything in every kind of weather. Though the newspaper was not aggressive in reporting the news or particularly creative when it came to reproducing or displaying pictures, there was barrier between me and my subjects and the possibility of taking a a revealing and/or dramatic picture was invigorating and satisfying.. The key to photojournalism was being there for the moment that told the story. Much of that is luck but after a while any photographer develops a sense of what is about to happen and positions himself or herself accordingly.
But was it art? Usually it was a combination of journalism and craftsmanship. Occasionally a particular moment would lend itself to an artistic interpretation, however subtlety, but usually it was just the act of being there and finding the pertinent details to convey an accurate sense of what occurred. My Middletown Journal experience fed my artistic soul mostly by the experience of seeing that small part of the world in southwestern Ohio. One day I photographed a ballet rehearsal and then drove out to the countryside and took pictures of disgruntled farmers upset by the lack of law enforcement in their town.
The pictures of the two assignments were not noteworthy, though the experience of being in two wildly different situations was. Each week I would encounter 20-25 new people in the course of my work. I would chronicle our mundane existence in people's homes, at their work, at play, and occasionally during tragic moments. Had I been sequestered in an office each day, I would have been no better off than the editors who labored in a windowless newsroom, essentially cut off from the world they reported on.
Often when I came back from an assignment someone would ask me about the weather. How odd that an editor or reporter would have to ask about the weather, the most basic story for any local newspaper. One day I asked the publisher if a window could be installed in the newsroom to provide a view of the world we were supposedly covering. He chuckled, scoffed really, at the ludicrous notion that a window would benefit a bunch of journalists.
The hours were long and unpredictable, and the pay was awful, though living in Middletown was cheap and I met my wife Lisa there. She was the police and fire reporter. In 1983 we left Middletown for Phoenix where I had lived from 6th grade through high school and where my parents still live.
I started a commercial photography business and Lisa worked in advertising and Public relations before working at a parenting magazine. More to come...
This is a sculpture I made in high school.